Colour Field Painting (c.1948-68)

Definition/Characteristics

The term "Colour Field painting"
refers to a particular style of American Abstract
Expressionism, associated with the New
York School of modern art. Pioneered by Clyfford Still (1904-80),
Barnett Newman (1905-70) and Mark Rothko (1903-70), this
abstract art was characterised by large
fields of flat, solid colour, which enveloped the spectator when seen
at close quarters. It deliberately avoided portraying forms standing out
against a background. Instead, form and background and ground
are one, and the picture - seen as a field, rather than a window, draws
the eye beyond the edges of the canvas. The style was designed above all
to have an emotional impact on the viewer. During the late 1950s, a second
generation of American expressionists, including the abstract painters
Helen Frankenthaler (b.1928), Morris Louis (1912-62), Kenneth
Noland (b.1924) and Jules Olitski (1922-2007), developed a
more impersonal, more formalist style of Colour Field, devoid of all emotional
and spiritual elements. This approach was one of several reinterpretations
of Abstract Expressionism, which were given the name Post
Painterly Abstraction, by the art critic Clement
Greenberg (1909-94), and showcased in a 1964 exhibition at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This led to a revival of Colour Field
painting in Britain, exemplified in works by Robyn Denny (b.1930), John
Hoyland (b.1934), Richard Smith (b.1931) and others.

White Center (Yellow, Pink and
Lavender on Rose) (1950)
Private Collection. By the painter
Mark Rothko, who created some of
the greatest 20th century paintings
in the Colour Field style.

EVOLUTION
OF VISUAL ART
For details of art movements
and styles, see: History of Art.
For the chronology and dates
of key events in the evolution
of visual arts around the world
see: History of Art Timeline.

WHAT IS ART?
For a guide to the different,
categories/meanings of visual
arts, see: Definition of Art.

History

Colour field painting came about as a result
of different independent attempts by Still, Rothko and Newman, during
the late 1940s, to create an eternal form of art which might transcend
the ethical collapse triggered by the chaos and carnage of World War II:
a type of painting that would speak for itself. Rejecting all forms of
representational art or figuration, they also avoided the gestural abstract
expressionist idiom of Willem
de Kooning and Jackson
Pollock, even though the latter's "action-painting"
can be seen as a pioneering attempt to create an "all-over"
field of colour, recalling Monet's huge water lily canvases.

The emergence of Colour Field effectively
divided Abstract Expressionist
painting into two styles - (1) gestural and full of contrast and action;
(2) smooth, flat, and relatively incident-free with large fields of rich
colour. Exponents of the latter style, like Still, Rothko and Newman,
devoted more attention to formal elements in their painting - such as
line, shape, colour - than secondary elements such as context or narrative,
and this emphasis on formalism was strongly supported by the highly influential
art critic Clement Greenberg, whose support guaranteed the style widespread
attention, and approval. For US collections which include examples of
colour field painting by American artists, see: Art
Museums in America.

First Generation Colour Field Painters

Mark
Rothko, who never actually acknowledged the label "Colour Field
Painter", specialized in large-scale canvases, resonating with emotive
colour applied in the form of blocks of colour hovering over coloured
backgrounds. A good example is his Magenta, Black, Green on Orange.
Commenting on the effect of his pictures, he once said: "I'm interested
only in expressing basic human emotions  tragedy, ecstasy, doom
and so on - and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when
confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human
emotions." Rothko achieved major success during the mid-1950s, being
tipped by Fortune magazine in 1954 as a "promising investment".
See also: Mark Rothko's
Paintings (1938-70).

Clyfford
Still, raised in the wide open spaces of North Dakota and Washington
state, is traditionally acknowledged as the first Colour Field painter,
because of a number of works which he exhibited in 1947. These works are
noted for their juxtaposition of different colours and jagged flashes
of colour, along with their sharp textural contrasts of smoothness versus
impasto. This textural style proved more popular than Newman's smooth
surface finish, and Still's reputation soared during the 1950s.

Robert
Motherwell (1915-91) produced some works combining fields of painterly
surfaces with gestural shapes (eg. Elegy to The Spanish Republic)
- a mixture of both man trends in Abstract Expressionism. But later paintings,
like his Open Series of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, embodies
Colour Field only.

Barnett
Newman was a later starter. In 1947, he curated an exhibition for
the Betty Parsons Gallery entitled The Ideographic Picture, which
showcased paintings by Mark Rothko, Still, and Hans
Hofmann. The exhibition name derives from "ideograph", a
term usually applied to markings in prehistoric cave
painting which suggest the idea of an object. Newman was searching
for an art form which was more eternal than something taken from nature,
which might date or deteriorate. The following year he wrote a seminal
explanation of Colour Field entitled "The Sublime is Now"
(1948). He stated that, in a time of ethical uncertainty, artists had
to reach out for absolute beauty (the sublime) rather than relative beauty.
His works are typically marked by flat areas of colour, divided by thin
vertical lines (he called them "zips") - see them as flashes
of cosmic light or infinity. Although in public Newman adhered to the
idea that his works were non-naturalistic and strictly non-narrative,
he later gave them names, implying the existence of some illustrative
or narrative content - as in his dark picture (1949) which he named Abraham.
His father who had passed away in 1947 was also called Abraham. Unfortunately
Newman's spare, minmalist style proved much less popular than the more
expressive idiom of Pollock, De Kooning and even Rothko. It wasn't until
the mid-1960s that he achieved recognition as a major artist.

Jackson Pollock also created numerous
non-gestural works, notably his semi-figurative black stain paintings
of 1951, and his full colour stain paintings of 1952. By this stage he
was already America's most famous artist.

Second Generation Colour Field Painters

During the late 1950s, deeply influenced
by the colour stain works of Helen
Frankenthaler, a new group of artists - notably Kenneth
Noland, Morris Louis, and Jules Olitski - began to adopt an even
more formalist approach. Although their predecessors in Colour Field,
like Newman and Rothko, had always given priority to consistency of form
and process, rather than gesture, brushwork and general incident, the
new generation sought to eliminate all subjective traces from their work,
including any trace of brushstrokes.

In 1964, Clement dubbed this new formalism
"Post Painterly Abstraction", and curated a special exhibition
of 30 exponents of the new style, at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art.

Devoid of metaphysical concerns, and unconcerned
about the dominant decorative quality of their work, these new artists
produced a new super-smooth type of painting with no unevenness of texture
or form. In addition to those listed above, other second generation Colour
Field painters included: Al Held (b.1928), Ellsworth Kelly
(b.1923) and Frank Stella
(b.1936) - all 3 better known as exponents of Hard
Edge Painting - Joan Mitchell (1926-92), Richard Diebenkorn
(1922-93), Gene Davis (1920-85), among others.

Decline and Fall

During the 1960s, this highly formalist
trend of Colour Field painting (which Greenberg nicknamed Post-Painterly
Abstraction) fragmented into smaller groups such as Washington Colour
School, Hard-edge painting, Lyrical Abstraction, and
Minimal Painting. Most of these groups and tendencies continued
to pursue a reductionist agenda, in order to purge art of superfluous
rhetoric and allusion, while incorporating a carefully planned, psychological
use of color. Above all, the 1960s generation of Colour Field painters
audaciously presented their abstraction as an end in itself. This was
doomed to fail. And so it did. During the late 1960s/early 1970s this
venture led abstract expressionists up a blind alley, called Minimalism,
which took them nowhere. (Actually, it took them as far as Post-Minimalism
and its ugly child Process Art, which did literally decompose and evaporate!)
As for those Colour Field painters who avoided minimalism, they were marginalized
by new genres of Postmodernist art,
such as Video and Installation art, as well as more intricate varieties
of Conceptual art, as evidenced by the list of Turner Prize-winners. (See
Contemporary Art.)

Meanwhile in Europe...

A similar type of fragmentation was occurring
in Europe: the main abstract expressionist movement Art
Informel, broke up into numerous different styles and tendencies,
such as Tachisme, Art Non
Figuratif, Abstraction Lyrique,
and others.